The interior of the University Cup coffee house looked like it always had. The chalkboards still bore the menu, the ceiling was still decorated with burlap bags that once held 70 kilos of coffee beans, and the calming water sculpture on the wall still trickled, as it had for so many years.

But this was the closing chapter in the story of the first coffee house and espresso bar at Central Michigan University. Boxes of cups, rows of chairs and tables, racks of flavoring syrup and all the other restaurant equipment were being auctioned off.

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The first chapter began with a 20-something young couple with university degrees, corporate jobs and a yen to do something else.

“We were living in Columbia, S.C.,” said Lori Driessnack, a native of Mt. Pleasant. She’d met the man who would become her husband, Tim Driessnack, on a blind date at Michigan State University a few years before. They, like thousands of other college graduates in the 1990s, took their diplomas, moved away and started collecting corporate paychecks.

“I’m not a corporate kind of guy,” Tim said. He was looking for an opportunity, and his father-in-law, Dave Lapham, had an idea. Lapham owned a number of student rentals, and said early 1990s CMU students desperately wanted a coffee house.

“I told him, ‘If you can find me a location …,” Tim said. Turned out he could – an actual house just off campus on Franklin Street. The land where the bungalow sits was zoned commercial, the couple could afford it, and they decided to go for it.

“I saw a photo of the place and said, ‘Let’s buy it,’” Tim said. The University Cup Coffee Co., with its distinctive, quasi-Victorian smiling sun logo, opened in 1994.

“There was a need,” Lori said. “It just took off.”

The U-Cup became a major off-campus gathering place. Bands played Friday and Saturday nights. Tuesdays were open mic nights. People met there, studied there, dreamed there, proposed marriages there. There was at least one wedding rehearsal dinner at the U-Cup.

And the coffee, tea and espresso flowed for years. The building acquired its distinctive burnt-orange paint somewhere in there, almost as bright as the autumn leaves on Franklin and Bellows streets.

“There was always a vase of flowers for the baristas,” Lori said. Many baristas began work as freshmen, worked all through school, and still stay in touch with the Driessnacks.

“You came to love those employees,” Lori said. “They didn’t quit.”

But the once-bohemian culture of the coffeehouse was changing. Starbucks expanded from Seattle. Large food-service companies got in the act. Drive-through windows became a requirement. Even McDonald’s added coffee beverages to its menu.

“The market changed,” Tim said. Customers, with a plethora of choices, got their caffeine fix elsewhere. The last straw was the opening of a Starbucks in the Bovee University Center a couple of blocks away.

“We had wrestled with the decision for more than a year,” he said. The University Cup closed its doors at the end of June.

It’s not clear what will happen to the property. There’s a “For Lease” sign in the window, and Tim said there’s been some interest. A proposal to rezone the land for a student-type apartment house was set to go before the Mt. Pleasant Planning Commission, but was pulled at the last minute over uncertainty about the city’s plans for the neighborhood.

“We’d given it its time,” Tim said. And for people who still must have that special cup of coffee from the U-Cup, it’s still available in the lobby of McLaren Central Michigan hospital.

They call it the H-Cup, for Hospital Cup.

About the Author

Mark Ranzenberger has told the stories of mid-Michigan since 1973. He’s the online editor of TheMorningSun.com. Follow him on Twitter and Tout @ranzenberger. He still has a landline at 989-779-6042. Reach the author at mranzenberger@michigannewspapers.com
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